Monthly Wrap-Up

A few weeks ago I was walking through a field and saw this guy on a trash-heap:

I whipped out my camera, but I needn’t have hurried.

I think I’ve seen more random taxidermy since I moved to Texas than in all of the rest of my life put together. I don’t know why, but Texans really, really enjoy stuffing animals and pieces of animals. I mentioned this phenomenon to a coworker here, and her eyes lit up with delight and nostalgia as she told me about the first creature she ever taxidermied (a mouse) and how she still proudly displays it in her home. I am not making this up.

Summer is in full swing now, but I don’t want to forget to mention how gorgeous Texas is in the springtime.

Everything was in bloom, everywhere. I didn’t get a lot of photos, because working full time in retail kind of swallowed up my life for a while until I adjusted to it. On the plus side, this job is getting me into better shape than I’ve been in in years.

It’s like getting paid to go to the gym for eight hours a day.

The horses that run wild down by the Trinity River have added some new babies to their little herd.

They keep their distance now and scamper off if Mahogany and I get too close.

Farther up the river, there’s a nice park area where I can work on training Mahogany to cross moving water. We haven’t gone there much, because getting to it involved crossing a narrow road-bridge with no way to get out of the way of traffic. But we braved it today, and discovered that the culvert has been reconstructed to allow for crossing beside the bridge. Now I have TWO places to train Mahogany on water crossings!

And the park is great for just galloping at full speed across the open meadows.

School is out for the summer. As per our custody agreement, Luke and Elizabeth are each spending four weeks in California with their dad. Luke went first; he’ll be coming back to Texas this weekend and Elizabeth will fly out to California few days later. It’s their first experience with flying, so that’s kind of exciting. Selfie at the airport:

An out-of-state Facebook friend came out to Arlington on business this week and invited me to have breakfast with him yesterday morning. Neither of us were familiar with that area, so I got some restaurant recommendations from a local friend and we ended up at a colorful little dive straight out of a grainy ’70s movie. So much food was piled in front of me that I ended up bringing most of it home home for lunch. The company was very nice, and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. This was the first date I’ve been on since my marriage ended six years ago, so it feels like a milestone.

And that’s all the news for the month. Life is good. Oh! How To Train Your Dragon 2 is an amazing movie, go see it!